Fancy E-mail Or Megabyte-size Headache?

That's just a sampling of the stunning footage contained in a digital video promoting the new ``Star Wars'' movie.

The 2- 1/2-minute video, known in the business as a movie ``trailer,'' is so popular that thousands of ``Star Wars'' fans have taken to e-mailing it to friends -- straining mail servers and taxing Internet connections worldwide.

It's the latest evidence that e-mail isn't just for text anymore.

Once limited almost entirely to plain-text messages, e-mail increasingly contains everything from photographs and greeting cards to video clips, sound bites and animation.

To many, the phenomenon signals the beginning of a new era of computer messaging.

``E-mail and messages are becoming more multimedia in general,'' said Kerry C. Stackpole, president of the Electronic Messaging Association, a leading trade group. ``More and more systems can talk to each other, and so you can send along things that are more active.''

To be sure, computer users have long been able to attach files, such as word-processing documents and spreadsheets, to their e-mail messages. And that same capability was occasionally used to convey other kinds of files, like a still photograph.

But the growing availability of powerful multimedia PCs, and the widespread availability of video and audio recording devices, has pushed the multimedia content of e-mail messages skyward.

Richard Bliss, vice president of marketing for Allegro, a computer security firm, said his company started noticing the increase in multimedia attachments about 18 months ago.

Upon closer analysis, the firm discovered that digital Christmas cards, often featuring animation and sound, were being exchanged over the Internet. The activity spiked again near Valentine's Day, at St. Patrick's Dayand again at Mother's Day.

``This past Christmas, we realized that the process was going to happen again,'' Bliss said. ``I was blocking one gigabyte of these junk Christmas files every 90 minutes.''

The makers of digital greeting cards agree that such messages have become increasingly popular among tech-savvy Internet users.

``What we're seeing here is more and more consumers, especially younger consumers, who are using electronic greetings or on-line greetings to enhance their one-on-one communications with people,'' said Jim King, a spokesman for American Greetings, one of the nation's top greeting card makers.

Visitors to the American Greetings Web site at www.americangreetings.com can personalize a digital card, often complete with animation and sound, and then e-mail it directly to the intended recipient.

To King, the demand for multimedia cards simply represents the natural evolution of what people want technology to do for them.

``We really do think it's a great thing for ourselves and the industry and for consumers,'' he said. ``As the technology improves, people continue to use the technology to communicate more effectively with each other.''

Hallmark, the industry leader, is also seeing consumer interest in multimedia cards. But the company is moving cautiously to embrace the trend lest its customers become frustrated with slow downloads or inadequate computer equipment.

``It's always been this sort of tightrope walk because the technology has moved a lot faster than people's systems have,'' said Kathi Mishek, spokeswoman for Hallmark.com. ``Those are things that we've looked into, and we're ready to do them when our consumers say, `Yes,' we've got the bandwidth to do them.''

More recently, multimedia e-mail has been moving beyond greeting cards to short video clips. The ``Star Wars'' trailer may be the most recent example, but over the last couple of years, several others have circulated widely over the Internet.

A little over a year ago, for example, there was a flurry of interest in an animated video showing a dancing baby after the tyke was featured on an episode of ``Ally McBeal.''

Another video clip -- usually identified as badday.exe -- ran wild over the Internet last summer. The video, apparently taken witha security camera, showed a heavy-set computer user in a cubicle who suddenly smashes his PC in frustration as a baffled co-worker looks on. (There is some suspicion the video was staged.)

Still another animated clip called ``blender.exe'' depicts a cartoon frog being ground up in a blender. Yet another called ``blinddate'' shows a couple whose first date is interrupted by some ill-timed flatulence.

While such videos can be amusing in a weird, cyberspace sort of way, they are worrying some e-mail administrators and computer security experts.

For one thing, the sheer size of such clips can be a major problem, clogging the e-mail system of small organizations or those with slow Internet connections. The ``Star Wars'' trailer alone weighs in at 25 megabytes. Blinddate takes more than 2 megabytes.